AI

There’s an AI ‘brain drain’ in academia

Comment

Digitally generated image, perfectly usable for all kinds of topics related to digital innovations, AI, data processing, network security or technology and computer science in general.
Image Credits: Getty Images

As one might expect, lots of students who graduate with a doctorate in an AI-related field end up joining an AI company, whether a startup or Big Tech giant.

According to Stanford’s 2021 Artificial Intelligence Index Report, the number of new AI PhD graduates in North America entering the AI industry post-graduation grew from 44.4% in 2010 to around 48% in 2019. By contrast, the share of new AI PhDs entering academia dropped from 42.1% in 2010 to 23.7% in 2019.

Private industry’s willingness to pay top dollar for AI talent is likely a contributing factor.

Jobs from the biggest AI ventures, like OpenAI and Anthropic, list eye-popping salaries ranging from $700,000 to $900,000 for new researchers, per data from salary negotiation service Rora. Google has reportedly gone so far as to offer large grants of restricted stock to incentivize leading data scientists.

While AI graduates are no doubt welcoming the trend — who wouldn’t kill for a starting salary that high? — it’s having an alarming impact on academia.

A 2019 survey co-authored by researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing found that close to 100 AI faculty members left North American universities for industry jobs between 2018 and 2019 — an outsized cohort in the context of a specialized computer science field. Between 2004 and 2019, Carnegie Mellon alone saw 16 AI faculty members depart, and the Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Washington lost roughly a dozen each, the study found.

The effects of the mass faculty exodus have been far-reaching, with the Hebrew University and Cheung Kong survey concluding that it’s had an especially stark impact on AI companies founded by students graduating from universities where those professors used to work. Per the survey, there’s a chilling effect on entrepreneurism in the years following faculty departures at a college, with the impact intensifying when the AI professors who leave are replaced by faculty from lower-ranked schools or untenured professors.

That’s perhaps why AI companies and labs are increasingly recruiting talent from industry — not universities.

A new report from VC firm SignalFire suggests that the percentage of AI hires coming from top schools such as Caltech, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford — or those with doctorates — has dropped significantly from a peak of around 35% in 2015. In 2023, the percentage was closer to 18%, as AI companies began to look for and hire more non-graduate candidates.

“We discovered a high concentration of top AI talent amongst a few startups when historically we saw this clustering at public giants like Google,” Ilya Kirnos, SignalFire’s co-founder and CTO, told TechCrunch+ via email. “That led us to look at where top AI talent was moving across the industry, and whether talent was more correlated with top universities or top startups.”

To arrive at its findings, SignalFire identified a subset of top AI talent via two routes: academic publications and open source project contributions. (Kirnos acknowledges that many AI researchers don’t publish papers or contribute to open source, but says that the report is meant to show a “representative slice” of the AI talent ecosystem rather than the whole picture.)

SignalFire cross-referenced authors at major AI conferences like NeurIPS and ICML with university employment listings to identify AI faculty, and then matched the contributors to popular AI software projects on GitHub with public employment feeds (like LinkedIn) to identify top overall contributors.

Kirnos says that SignalFire’s data shows a growing preference on the part of AI companies (e.g., Hugging Face, Stability AI, Midjourney) for alternatives to prestigious graduate hiring pools, with one of those alternatives being open research communities spawned by new emerging new AI tradecraft (see: prompt engineering). And this, Kirnos claims, is a good thing for its potential to lower the industry barrier to entry for non-PhDs.

“This will create demand for new ways to assess recruiting candidates for real-world software engineering experience,” Kirnos said. “Instead of filtering by university brand names, we may see employers seek out new ways to screen applicants for expertise in building functional products out of the stack the company actually uses.”

Diversity is in the eye of the beholder, of course.

According to the Stanford study, AI PhD programs were decidedly homogenous as of 2019, with white students accounting for 45% of AI PhD graduates. But so were AI teams in industry. In its State of AI in 2022 report, McKinsey found that the average share of employees identifying as racial or ethnic minorities developing AI solutions was a paltry 25%, and 29% of organizations had no minority employees working on AI whatsoever.

Kirnos stands behind his assertion, but does suggest that universities could look to provide students more opportunities to apply research in real-world scenarios that more closely mirror work experience in the sector.

“Engineering is increasingly moving away from building whole products from scratch in a vacuum,” he added, “and toward cobbling together stacks of AI models, APIs, enterprise tools and open source software.”

This writer’s hopeful that universities sit up and pay attention to the alarming trend — and then do something about it. Prestigious AI doctorate programs deserve criticism for their exclusivity, certainly, and the ways in which it concentrates power and accelerates inequality. But I for one am loathe to embrace a future where industry, through hiring and other means of influence, commands increasing control over the AI field’s direction.

More TechCrunch

The Kia EV3 — the new all-electric compact SUV revealed Thursday — illustrates a growing appetite among global automakers to bring generative AI into their vehicles.  The automaker said the…

The new Kia EV3 will have an AI assistant with ChatGPT DNA

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, isn’t working properly right now. At first, we noticed it wasn’t possible to perform a web search at all. Now it seems search results are loading…

Bing’s API is down, taking Microsoft Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT’s web search feature down too

If you thought autonomous driving was just for cars, think again. The so-called ‘autonomous navigation’ market — where ships steer themselves guided by AI, resulting in fuel and time savings…

Autonomous shipping startup Orca AI tops up with $23M led by OCV Partners and MizMaa Ventures

The best known mycoprotein is probably Quorn, a meat substitute that’s fast approaching its 40th birthday. But Finnish biotech startup Enifer is cooking up something even older: Its proprietary single-cell…

Meet the Finnish biotech startup bringing a long lost mycoprotein to your plate

Silo, a Bay Area food supply chain startup, has hit a rough patch. TechCrunch has learned that the company on Tuesday laid off roughly 30% of its staff, or north…

Food supply chain software maker Silo lays off ~30% of staff amid M&A discussions

Featured Article

Meta’s new AI council is composed entirely of white men

Meanwhile, women and people of color are disproportionately impacted by irresponsible AI.

13 hours ago
Meta’s new AI council is composed entirely of white men

If you’ve ever wanted to apply to Y Combinator, here’s some inside scoop on how the iconic accelerator goes about choosing companies.

Garry Tan has revealed his ‘secret sauce’ for getting into Y Combinator

Indian ride-hailing startup BluSmart has started operating in Dubai, TechCrunch has exclusively learned and confirmed with its executive. The move to Dubai, which has been rumored for months, could help…

India’s BluSmart is testing its ride-hailing service in Dubai

Under the envisioned framework, both candidate and issue ads would be required to include an on-air and filed disclosure that AI-generated content was used.

FCC proposes all AI-generated content in political ads must be disclosed

Want to make a founder’s day, week, month, and possibly career? Refer them to Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2024! Applications close June 10 at 11:59 p.m. PT. TechCrunch’s Startup…

Refer a founder to Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2024

Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is officially launching DMs (direct messages), the company announced on Wednesday. Later, Bluesky plans to “fully support end-to-end encrypted messaging down the line,”…

Bluesky now has DMs

The perception in Silicon Valley is that every investor would love to be in business with Peter Thiel. But the venture capital fundraising environment has become so difficult that even…

Peter Thiel-founded Valar Ventures raised a $300 million fund, half the size of its last one

Featured Article

Spyware found on US hotel check-in computers

Several hotel check-in computers are running a remote access app, which is leaking screenshots of guest information to the internet.

16 hours ago
Spyware found on US hotel check-in computers

Gavet has had a rocky tenure at Techstars and her leadership was the subject of much controversy.

Techstars CEO Maëlle Gavet is out

The struggle isn’t universal, however.

Connected fitness is adrift post-pandemic

Featured Article

A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized…

18 hours ago
A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs

HoundDog actually looks at the code a developer is writing, using both traditional pattern matching and large language models to find potential issues.

HoundDog.ai helps developers prevent personal information from leaking

The changes are designed to enhance the consumer experience of using Google Pay and make it a more competitive option against other payment methods.

Google Pay will now display card perks, BNPL options and more

Few figures in the tech industry have earned the storied reputation of Vinod Khosla, founder and partner at Khosla Ventures. For over 40 years, he has been at the center…

Vinod Khosla is coming to Disrupt to discuss how AI might change the future

AI has already started replacing voice agents’ jobs. Now, companies are exploring ways to replace the existing computer-generated voice models with synthetic versions of human voices. Truecaller, the widely known…

Truecaller partners with Microsoft to let its AI respond to calls in your own voice

Meta is updating its Ray-Ban smart glasses with new hands-free functionality, the company announced on Wednesday. Most notably, users can now share an image from their smart glasses directly to…

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses now let you share images directly to your Instagram Story

Spotify launched its own font, the company announced on Wednesday. The music streaming service hopes that its new typeface, “Spotify Mix,” will help Spotify distinguish its own unique visual identity. …

Why Spotify is launching its own font, Spotify Mix

In 2008, Marty Kagan, who’d previously worked at Cisco and Akamai, co-founded Cedexis, a (now-Cisco-owned) firm developing observability tech for content delivery networks. Fellow Cisco veteran Hasan Alayli joined Kagan…

Hydrolix seeks to make storing log data faster and cheaper

A dodgy email containing a link that looks “legit” but is actually malicious remains one of the most dangerous, yet successful, tricks in a cybercriminal’s handbook. Now, an AI startup…

Bolster, creator of the CheckPhish phishing tracker, raises $14M led by Microsoft’s M12

If you’ve been looking forward to seeing Boeing’s Starliner capsule carry two astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. The…

Boeing, NASA indefinitely delay crewed Starliner launch

TikTok is the latest tech company to incorporate generative AI into its ads business, as the company announced on Tuesday that it’s launching a new “TikTok Symphony” AI suite for…

TikTok turns to generative AI to boost its ads business

Gone are the days when space and defense were considered fundamentally antithetical to venture investment. Now, the country’s largest venture capital firms are throwing larger portions of their money behind…

Space VC closes $20M Fund II to back frontier tech founders from day zero

These days every company is trying to figure out if their large language models are compliant with whichever rules they deem important, and with legal or regulatory requirements. If you’re…

Patronus AI is off to a magical start as LLM governance tool gains traction

Link-in-bio startup Linktree has crossed 50 million users and is rolling out the beta of its social commerce program.

Linktree surpasses 50M users, rolls out its social commerce program to more creators